Buzz Out Loud 656: Rumor-palooza

Sometimes there's just no news. And sometimes there's just rumors of news. Today is an example of the latter. Half the stories today are rumors of somebody coming out with some products or somebody buying somebody else. Plus we critique my resume.

Every time you guys (or anyone) talk about location-based ads on our
phones, Starbucks is always brought up as an example. You might want to
come up with something different. There is always a Starbucks
across the street or on the next corner. You don't need any location
detector for that.

Just wanted to give you a heads up. From what I've been reading the
Sprint unlimited plan does not cover data on smartphones and
BlackBerrys. You'll still need to hand over an arm or leg to get
unlimited data plans.

Nick

Cable update
Hello again,

FLAG telecom (the company in charge of those sea cables) released a
bulletin yesterday with updates regarding the status of the server.
They can be found on the official site.
Some of the main points:

The ship loaded with spares has reached the fault location and has
initiated the repair work; the repair work is estimated to be completed
within 6-7 days. The Mediterranean network will be fully resilient with the addition of
FLAG Mediterranean Cable current under implementation.
The cable cut was reported at 0800 GMT on January 30th 2008 around 8.3
Km away from Alexandria cable landing station between Egypt - Italy
segment.

Cut # 2: FALCON Cable cut between Dubai (UAE) and Al Seeb(Oman)

The ship loaded with spares, marine experts, and optical engineers have
reached the site yesterday. The crew has recovered the one end of the
cable and cable joining work is in progress. The repair team has observed steady progress and the repair work are
expected to be completed in next 3-4 days. The weather conditions are not favorable but the crew is continuing with
the repair process. The cable cut was reported at 0559 GMT on February 1st 2008 around 56 Km
from Dubai, UAE on segment between UAE and Oman.

Best regards...

Khaled A. from Saudi Arabia

How IPv6 will work
OK Buzz-kids...

Having heard two BOL podcasts where confused information about IPv6 was
discussed, I'll try to present a simple, straight-forward, explanation
of how IPv6 is supposed to work. Since I work in the industry, I have
some insights into it.

IPv6 addresses are four times the length of IPv4 addresses, so that's
128 bits instead of 32. With that long of an address, the intent is
that an ISP will give out an "IPv6 Prefix" to each customer instead of
simply an address. So, the way it will work is that your IPv6 router
will use "DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation" to acquire an IPv6 Prefix from your
ISP. Your router will then use DHCPv6 (the IPv6 version of
DHCP) to hand out addresses to each of the devices in your house.
There's even an "address autoconfiguration" method by which your device
can configure its own IPv6 address without the need of a DHCP server at
all. (By the way, Vista already supports DHCPv6 and Mac OS X supports
IPv6 autoconfig.) Since you're being given a whole "prefix" (the IPv6
equivalent of an IPv4 "subnet"), there's no need for sharing one address
and thus no need for "Network Address Translation" (NAT).

The people who design the protocols which run on the Internet
(the "Internet Engineering Task Force" or IETF )
actually, in general, don't like NAT because it complicates a lot of
protocols. Think of all of the protocols which you've heard "have
problems passing through a NAT." If we can get rid of NAT with IPv6,
we'll be a lot better off. (One address space to rule them all!)

Now, having removed NAT in IPv6 doesn't mean that we also will remove
all of the security issues related to current NAT usage. Those same
types of security issues will still need to addressed. They just won't
be "automatically solved" via NAT and will need to be addressed directly
instead. But, that's a whole podcast in itself!

Keep up the good work, guys and gals! Love the show!

Richard

IPv6 and routing
Hi guys.

Tom is essentially correct, there are several reasons why you would need
to use a router for IPv6

ISPs may do a per-device charging when ISPs are converted to IPv6.
This probably is the case, depending on the type of service you have
(either residential or commercial). FYI, there are some ISPs that will
charge businesses 2x as much under a business plan with lower bandwidth
(never did figure that one out).

You would leave yourself vulnerable to attacks within the same ISP
network if you don't (people seeing your machines and your shares).
Sooner or later, some dunderhead will crack the Wii or the Xbox and
plant viruses to detect what device you would have on a
network...without a router. I am not saying it's impossible behind one,
but just a general broadcasting virus would do major damage (anyone
remember code red?).

Considering that not many normal people do not change their machine
names in Windows when they get a new Windows PC (owner-pc being a
popular one), you would have conflicts and average Joe user wouldn't
know how to fix this on his own. Again, goes back to #1 (more staff,
higher prices).

Overall privacy . We all open shares etc. to other machines to have
easy access to our files between multiple machines in the house and for
file storage. It's still my stuff, and you can't have any of it without
my permission.

Have a good one.

Ed

Routers and IPv6
Tom, you're right on the money. Even though we won't technically need IP
routing in a few years, there are a *lot* of advantages of routers
beyond IPv4 extending. First, there's privacy. I don't want my Internet
traffic from my home or office being tracked down to the device level.
Although an ISP can technically see many of the devices behind a NAT
router now by examining packet traffic, they would be able to know
*every* kind and how *many* devices you have if they can track them by
IP. Cable box, DVR, refrigerator, server, toothbrush, computer, etc.
Second, a NAT router helps weed out nasty incoming virus, bot, and
spammer connections. While that's primarily a firewall function, it's
very useful.

Charles in SF

Use of NAT in IPv6
Hi Buzz Out Loud crew,

Gideon from Philippines here. Been listening to the show for more than a
year already.

I could think of one good reason why NAT is still useful on IPv6 like it
is on IPv4: security. NAT is the simplest way to prevent the users from
the public Internet to be able to access your private internal network.
Plus, if all your computers and devices are behind a NAT, you're
basically blocking all inbound vulnerabilities on your OS, or other
software can be exploited remotely.